Posts Tagged by dice

Incorporating elements of the supernatural into my games has never been a strength of mine. I have to make a conscious effort to dip into that well. In most of the fantasy-style games I run, there are enough flesh and blood beasts, demons and devils to keep adventurers busy. But haunts and spirits are great for creating mood or for using as markers to point player characters in a certain direction. I need to utilize them more. To school myself in the gaming possibilities of […]

Today’s guest article is by Gnome Stew reader Michael, a DM with approximately 35 years of experience with roleplaying games, administrator of a D&D 5th edition community page, and a regular writer at Tribality.com. Thanks, Michael! –Martin The most crucial aspect of role playing is the story, but we waste a lot of time with administration of the game. And the most time consuming aspect of some role playing games is ROLL playing. I have been in some games where the dice are rolled at […]

Somewhere between a fetish and a compulsion lies my love of gaming accessories, especially dice bags. Ever since I put my basic set, crumbly, orange polyhedrons into a black felt pouch, I have been been drawn to things that help me to pack up and organize my gaming components. I am always on the lookout for new and novel ways to pack up my gaming gear, and this week I have found just that…All Rolled Up. Quick Disclaimer – While I purchased my All Rolled […]

Building on the idea of die drop tables and tools in Vornheim, I came up with a simple approach to quickly generating a region: the drop map. I had fantasy hexcrawls in mind when I wrote this, and the map I’ve created using this method is for that sort of game. There’s no reason you couldn’t fiddle with this in all sorts of ways to produce maps for larger/smaller regions, other genres, or even other kinds of maps entirely. It’s deliberately a lazy, quick, flexible […]

In a nice bit of synergy, I composed this piece before Matt’s excellent article on Alan DeSmet’s GameScience Dice Analysis, so it continues the die theme nicely. Unfortunately, this article doesn’t have nearly the comprehensive analysis (or fancy charts) that Matt’s did. Soldier on, I say! The question — and potential solutions — posed today revolve around the sharing of dice: Friendly gesture to the unprepared or sacred taboo to never be discussed? It’s Only Weird if it Doesn’t Work Gamers are a superstitious lot, […]

Almost every gamer has seen Lou Zocchi’s classic pitch for GameScience dice, and if you haven’t yet and have the 20 minutes, click that link. It’s worth a watch. About 4 minutes into the first video, Zocchi references his picture of stacked dice, seen to the right. This picture has long been the major piece of proof that GameScience fans point to as proof of the superiority of their favorite dice. We can date that picture between 1981 and 1991 because the far left stack […]

Here’s a simple random dungeon generation method that uses only a sheet of graph paper, a pencil and the bucket of dice every gamer already owns. Lay out your paper, dump your bucket of dice on it, and remove all the dice that didn’t roll their max, while being careful to move those that did as little as possible. Wherever you had a die roll max, draw a room of that size. Thus rolling a 4 on a d4 results in a room of size […]